this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place? (carlnewton.github.io)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/10422101

Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you guys think.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I tried a smaller Lemmy server first and it didn't meet my needs.

I used reddit in two specific but different ways:

  1. About a dozen subreddits that I would visit individually. Small Lemmy instances work fine for this. Just subscribe to the ones I care about

  2. Browsing r/all, taking in whatever was popular at any given moment. This only works on big Lemmy instances with wildly diverse federation.

I love the firehose of "what bizarre things bubbled to the top today? Oh snap, there's a scandal in the professional bowling community. This Farscape meme is hilarious even without context. Wow, look at that crazy picture of an owl riding another owl riding a bear" or whatever.

There was never enough content on small Lemmy servers to satisfy that itch. But scrolling the main feed on lemmy.world is good enough

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Browsing r/all, taking in whatever was popular at any given moment. This only works on big Lemmy instances with wildly diverse federation.

I don't think the instances needs to be that big to have enough networking effect to get most of all comms. Feddit.dk for instance is relatively small but the all feed is basically identical to any other major instance.

Certainly a very small instance could have a temporary issue like this but it could be easily improved by just fetching the missing comms. And again, you can certainly find smaller instances than lemmy.world that still have all the stuff in the all feed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

While you may be correct, that was my experience. As a new user, I joined two Lemmy instances, was unsatisfied with the full feed on both, and said "screw it, I'm going to the biggest server".

The problem with telling people they can fetch the missing comms are threefold:

  1. It becomes a perpetual maintenance task. New communities are being created all the time and I don't want to have to reference other servers' feeds regularly to stay up to date on the newest stuff. I might as well just be on that other server

  2. Part of the joy of the firehose is seeing when some completely obscure community has a wildly popular post that one time because it's extra funny or shocking or whatever. Those posts just won't make it to most smaller servers.

  3. It's an "unknown unknowns" problem. Sometimes you know what it is that you don't know and can go find it. But often I don't know which things I don't know, so I can't seek it out to add to my server. The beauty of a big server is that I don't have to do that legwork or even think about it.

All it takes is one user on the server subscribing to the Western Spotted Bull Frogs community for me to see it when they have a post blow up. The chances of one such user being on my server go way up here on lemmy.world. I'm sure there are smaller servers that are "good enough" in that regard. But why would I bother when I have what I want right here?

Not trying to be argumentative, just calling out what I see as a fundamental truth about Lemmy, compared to other fediverse applications. Like, on mastodon a big server's fedirated feed is more or less unreadable. That makes smaller servers appealing as it helps prioritize what makes it into the feed. On Lemmy, the voting system does that prioritization, removing one of the big reasons to avoid larger servers in the first place :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I agree that this is a problem and Lemmy could do better at community discovery. It just feels inefficient to fetch all new communities all the time, but maybe some auto-fetching in case of popular posts should happen? I'm not sure how exactly to solve this problem.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That's actually a GREAT idea.

Server admins should be able to opt-in to pulling in the top N posts per hour/day/week from connected instances. Could even have an option like "if a community shows up more than X times this way, subscribe the server to that community", and then toss all that stuff into Discover section or something.